I didn’t say that we should always take the police’s word for it. Whether the police officer really did have a reasonable and sincere belief is a matter to be decided by the courts, and dashcams are a valuable tool in helping to determine that.
If you want a concrete example, suppose we have a developmentally-disabled man playing with a toy water gun which realistically resembles a real gun. He sees the police, and thinks it’s a game of Cops and Robbers. He jumps out from behind an obstacle, and aims the squirt gun at them. The whole situation is caught on camera. Now, this man is no real threat, but it would be perfectly reasonable for the police to think he is, and to shoot him. That would be a justified shooting where the victim was not actually a felon.
I have a few friends who are police or work closely with the police. It’s interesting because when the idea of dash cams and wearable cams first came up, they were completely against it. How would you like your boss looking over your shoulder all the time?, or We’re people and talk about all sorts of stuff. Would our personal conversations be used against us?.
However, they have decided that these cams are something they want. You arrest someone, and by the time you get to headquarters covered with cuts and bruises. You say that happened when they tripped and fell on the sidewalk, they said they got that way because you beat them with your club after you cuffed them.
Without a video, you’re going to be put on desk duty for weeks. You’re going to be questioned by internal affairs. You’re going to be put through hell. Your name may be cleared, but it’s going to take a while, and it’s not going to necessarily satisfy you or those who accuse you of brutality. The best you get is there’s a lack of evidence to support the claims against you. That the same process that kept Al Capone out of jail.
However, a video can show the accused running away, tripping on the curb and sliding 90 feet down the sidewalk on his face. There’s no question about who is telling the truth. No investigation. No desk duty. You’re free and clear.
(Emphasis mine). I hate to be “that guy,” but the sentence’s meaning isn’t quite self-evident. A belief can’t be true or untrue, but it’s the thing that one believes that is either true or untrue. Take belief in a supreme deity, for example. One’s belief can be reasonable and sincere, but the belief isn’t quantifiable as true or false, only the existence of God. But a lot of people would dispute whether “sincere” is good enough to pass the “reasonable” test. Is it reasonable to believe in God?
I preface this with the above explanation, because I’m taking it to mean that while the officer’s belief can be sincere, how can we judge whether or not it was reasonable given the (not belief, but…) actual facts were true or false? The standard should never be what is reasonable to a single individual, but what is reasonable to a “common man” (or whatever the parlance used today is). Maybe a twitchy-fingered cop has his standard for “reasonable” but if it’s not at all compatible with the communities’ standards for reasonable, then do we really want twitchy-fingered cops making life-and-death decisions?
Perhaps the solution isn’t to punish the cop for his substandard sense of reason, but now that we know an officer’s reasoning is defective, then the best course of action would be to prevent putting him or her in a situation where impaired reason can result in the death of innocent people, and also develop some type of screening process that prevents such people from having such positions in the first place.
Meanwhile we have the prosecutor in this case trying to seek the death penalty due to actions taken in accordance with community sense of what is reasonable.
Perhaps the solution isn’t to look at the cop at all: perhaps the solution is to look at his training and management. Everything else is just a smokescreen.
When you look at a police incident, there should be two questions: (1) Was he acting in accord with his training? If not, that is a police management failure. (2) Was his training appropriate? If not, that is a police management failure.
Discussion about punishment or support for the cop on the spot just serves to redirect attention away from where it really needs to go. Clearly, this is not a question the police management thinks needs to be discussed in public.
Wait, so there’s no personal responsibility and/or culpability, everything is a problem with management?
I would argue point 1. Yes, If he was not acting in accord with training, there is an issue to find out why he felt that was acceptable. But he’s still on the hook for violating policy/regs, just like any other time he violates policy/regs.
And he’s potentially liable for civil damages and/or criminal charges.
It’s not one or the other - you have the individual and you have management. Both need to be evaluated.
I don’t see how you’d come up with any sort of probability of an American getting killed by a terrorist during any given future time period.
Terrorist acts tend to be infrequent, their casualties tend to differ from one another by orders of magnitude, and like all the mutual fund prospectuses (if that’s the correct plural) say, past performance does not necessarily predict future results.
It’s impossible to predict whether a terrorist act resulting in numerous (by any definition you like of ‘numerous’) fatalities will happen in a given upcoming time period, or what the scale of those fatalities will be.
And if you don’t have an estimate for that, then you can’t compute one of the two likelihoods being compared in the thread title, so the comparison itself is impossible.
If he’s not acting in accord with training, it’s a crime. But it’s a personal crime, like any other: nothing that needs any more attention from the press or the public than any other murder or theft or assualt.
But if he is a policeman, acting with the implicit support and under the direction of the police force, there absolutely is a big question. And that question needs to be directed to police management.
How are you (sustainably—so that society is stable and not even more fractured by violence than it is already, without taking the law into your own hands, and remembering that others should have the same rights and privileges as do you and your infant) going to prevent people from blowing marijuana in your infant’s face and pointing a loaded weapon at people, without laws?